The first Christmas at Vailima they had a party for the children who had never before seen a Christmas tree.

Tusitala’s birthday was always a special event to his island friends.  The feast was served in native style; all seated about on the floor.  Rather large gatherings they must have been, to judge from Mrs. Strong’s account.  “We had sixteen pigs roasted whole underground, three enormous fish (small whales, Lloyd called them), four hundred pounds of beef, ditto of pork, 200 heads of taro, great bunches of bananas, native delicacies done up in bundles of ti leaves, 800 pineapples, many weighing fifteen pounds, all from Lloyd’s patch.  Among the presents for Tusitala, besides flowers and wreaths, were fans, native baskets ... and cocoanut cups beautifully polished.”

[Illustration:  A feast of chiefs]

On these occasions the hosts were often entertained with dances and songs.  All the Samoans are great singers.  They composed songs about everything and everybody, so that one could judge the standing a person held by the songs that were sung about him.

Those sung at Vailima parties were usually written by one of the house “boys” and “they were danced and acted with great spirit....  Sometimes every member of the family would be represented ... but the central figure, the heart of the song was always Tusitala.”

It is a marvel with the many demands made upon him, his varied interests, and frequent visits to neighboring islands, Stevenson still found time to write stories, poems, prayers, notes of the South Sea Islands, Samoan history, and many, many letters.  “It is a life that suits me but absorbs me like an ocean,” he said.  Through it all his health continued fairly good.  He was able to take long tramps and rides that would have been physically impossible two years before.

Mrs. Strong acted as his secretary and the majority of his writing now was done by dictation.  “He generally makes notes early in the morning,” she wrote, “which he elaborates as he reads them aloud ... he never falters for a word, but gives me the sentence with capital letters and all the stops as clearly and steadily as though he were reading from an unseen book.”

The two South Sea books occupied much of his time, but it was of his own land and people so far away that he had so little hope of ever seeing again, he loved best to write.

“It is a singular thing,” he wrote to James Barrie, “that I should live here in the South Seas, and yet my imagination so continually inhabit the cold old huddle of grey hills from which we came.”

He finished and sent away further adventures of David Balfour and Alan Breck under the title of “David Balfour.”  “St. Ives” followed with its scenes laid around Edinburgh Castle, Swanston Cottage, and the Pentland Hills.  In his last book, “Weir of Hermiston,” the one he left unfinished, broken off in the midst of a word, he roamed the streets of Auld Reekie again with a hero very like what he had once been himself, who was likewise an enthusiastic member of the “Spec.”